


One Day Like This

by Aramley



Category: A Single Man (2009)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 21:57:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/142129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aramley/pseuds/Aramley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>One day like this a year'd see me right.</i> Pre-movie. One day in the life of George and Jim.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Day Like This

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sloganeer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sloganeer/gifts).



> Title from 'One Day Like This' by Elbow.

"Only fools greet the day with a smile," says George, primly.

"Oh, God, old man," Jim complains, but George doesn't need to open his eyes (as, indeed, he's no intention of doing) to know that he's smiling. "This again?"

"One day later than yesterday, one day closer."

"We should have this put on a record," Jim says. The bed shifts under him as he moves. "I could play it on the gramophone in the mornings, and then you wouldn't have to wake up at all."

"That would deprive you of your fun," says George. "What would you do without a foil to your insufferable cheerfulness? Half the pleasure of it's in your feeling superior to me."

"Mm, yeah, you got me," Jim says, lavishly affectionate, and leans over to press the conciliatory kiss to George's cheek. George raises a hand to mock-irritably push him away; ends up in trailing the backs of his fingers against Jim's neck and bare chest and back as Jim rolls away, laughing, and abandons their bed for the shower.

George shifts a little in the bed until his nose is pressed against Jim's still-warm pillow, which smells of Jim. George inhales: shampoo and aftershave and Brylcreem, common scents enough but mingled with some indefinable note that makes the whole, the _Jim_ -ness. In the bathroom the shower runs, Jim singing a little in a tuneful vibrato, and George entertains the thought of going to join him - of sucking him off lazily under the warm spray. Days started such have a dreamy, golden hue. But George lingers too long, and the next thing he knows is the shrill ring of the telephone - the shower has been switched off, and when George opens his eyes the alarm clock's metal hands have sliced fifteen minutes from the morning. Dozing like an old dog, he thinks ruefully.

Reaching with a sigh for his glasses on the side-table, George hears the pad of Jim's bare feet as he rushes to answer the telephone. He smiles and listens, although he knows who it must be; who else would call before work?

"Hello?" says Jim, and then, "He _llo_ , Charlotte," much brighter than George would have been. "No, of course it's not too early. Let me give him a call."

George sighs, and forces himself out of the tempting comfort of their bed before Jim can come and drag him from it. Jim's morning cheer is tyrannical.

"Hello, Geo," Charlotte says, brightly, when George reaches the phone. " _Is_ it too early?"

George sighs. "Charlotte, darling, would it stop you if I said it was?"

Out of the corner of his eye, George sees Jim bite his lip to keep from laughing as he goes about the morning ritual of making coffee, as ceremonial in its way as any elaborate Japanese tea service. There's an arresting grace in Jim's familiar movements around the kitchen, and after a moment George realises that he's heard nothing of what Charlotte is saying to him.

"Geo?" Charlotte says. "What do you say?"

George seizes command of his drifting attention. "I'm sorry Charley, you know I'm not at my best in the mornings. What was it you were asking?"

"Oh, only if you and Jim wanted to come over for dinner tonight," Charlotte says, indulgent of his morning self. He hears the wet drag of her cigarette. "Really," she says, on a rushing smoky exhale, "it's been an absolute age since you were here. Both of you."

"Dinner tonight," George says, aloud, for Jim's benefit. When Jim looks up and catches his eye, George gives him the faintest raised eyebrow that means, _what do you think?_ Jim gives a little loose-shouldered shrug; _sure, why not?_ The set of his mouth tempers it, means, _could be fun_ and _poor old Charlotte_ together. "Yes, why not. What time?"

"Oh, seven? Clay's on some school camping trip, so he won't -"

"I'm sorry, kiddo, I really must run," George says, quickly. Charlotte's son has never much interested him. "I'm going to be late for work. Jim let me oversleep this morning."

"That was really nice," Jim says, when George has managed to hang up. He sets George's coffee-cup and plate of buttered toast on the countertop. "Blaming it on me."

"I can't deny you have your uses," says George. "Even if you can be utterly insufferable."

-

Turning morning-grump George into Professor Falconer requires coffee and clothing; a process of subtle alchemy combining the effects of caffeine and tailoring to produce the neatly turned out figure who orders his papers into his leather briefcase while Jim sits out on the deck with coffee and the morning paper, still in his bathrobe.

"I suppose you plan to dress eventually," George says, stepping out onto the deck. This early the day still feels fresh and new-made, though promising heat.

"Eventually," says Jim, lazily shading his eyes with one hand as he cranes back to meet George's look. "Busy day?"

"One class. I shouldn't be late."

"Hey," Jim says, as George turns to leave. "I don't get a goodbye?"

George huffs, and smooths down his tie. "Out here?"

"Hmm, I guess one of the neighbours could be hiding in those trees over there. They do that sometimes. Weird neighbourhood."

"Don't be facetious."

"And don't be an ass. C'mere." Jim grabs the sleeve of George's jacket and drags him back - though truthfully, of course, he isn't pulling with enough force to drag an entirely unwilling George down for a kiss. Jim's mouth brushes softly across his, lips parted - he tastes of coffee, and he smiles into the kiss. George thinks of Susan who lives across the street, and the close-mouthed kisses he has watched her dutifully receive and bestow on the doorstep each morning.

"I'll call you from work," George says, when he makes himself draw back.

"Mm," Jim says, with a last kiss smudged across George's mouth. "Drive safe."

-

It's a morning free from classes, which he spends in his office marking his students' most recent essays. The essays are an accurate reflection of the general ability of the class - that is to say, the bulk of them are average, flanked by a few outliers at either end of the spectrum. He keeps a mental note of the shockers, storing them up greedily to be dispensed later for Jim's pleasure - for each one he thinks of a particularly cutting little remark and plays it out in his imagination as he draws circles around grievous misspellings and isolates idiot phrases and wobbly arguments with stern little parentheses, each stroke of the red pen a placeholder for Jim's amusement. George has made a kind of art of the cutting remark.

At one he eats his sandwich at his desk and calls home, on a whim - he is too cautious to call every day, but it always gives him a sort of illicit thrill to call Jim from the office line, as though he's doing something dangerous - sneaking something under the very noses of the Establishment in whose midst he passes unnoticed, like a double-agent.

The phone rings half-a-dozen times, and it's Jim's detached and impersonal telephone voice that answers, "Hello?"

"Hello," says George. "What are you up to?"

"Oh, hey," says Jim, transformed, warmth and _Jim_ -ness rushing back in like the tide. "Nothing special, just those drawings, you know. There's that meeting on Friday with the client. How's school?"

"The usual," George says, and Jim laughs, says, "That bad, huh?"

"Really, I despair of our future," George says; a stock phrase, worn smooth and harmless with long use, and delivered with a wry smile.

"You love it," Jim says, and George doesn't argue. "What are you doing?"

"Just marking essays. I shan't stay on after this afternoon's class. Is there anything we need? I can stop off on the way home."

"Oh, I guess something for Charlotte tonight, right? And we could use some dog food - yes," Jim says, half-laughing, in response to the high yapping of the dog in the background. " _Yes_ , that's right, I'm talking about you. I swear this one speaks English."

" _Understands_ English," says George, automatically, pedant that he is.

"Nah, he speaks it well enough, too," Jim says. "You hear that? If he's not saying, _get off your ass and bring me some food_ I don't know what that is."

"Then tell him I shall be as quick as I can," says George, smiling.

"I'll be sure to pass that along," says Jim.

-

Outside the grocery store, a young man in his Sunday-best suit clutches a bundle of leaflets in a sweating hand and offers Jesus' love to everyone who enters and leaves. On the way in, George is shielded from this dubious blessing by his fellow shoppers, but he exits alone and unprotected.

"Here you go, sir," the young man says, all carefully combed hair and open, earnest face. George takes the proffered leaflet instinctively. There are people who might recoil. But George enjoys his subterfuge.

"Thank you," George tells the boy, and enjoys the flush of pleasure across that pink fresh face. They catch them young, he thinks, as he turns away to the car, the boy's _God bless you, Sir_ , following him.

The header of the leaflet asks _What Is Your Destination?_ , a question whose supposed answer is undoubtedly the fires of Hell, for George at least. George, amused, notes two misused apostrophes in the rubric beneath and tucks the leaflet into his wrinkled brown paper bags of gin and canned dog food, and deposits the lot in the car's back seat. His destination promises none of the exquisite agonies or ecstasies of hell or heaven, only the earthly and entirely mortal happiness of home: books and coffee, dogs, and a man.

-

"Hello, hello," George calls as he lets himself into the house, and, smiling, "Hello," to the dog that runs up to meet him, nails skritching frantically on the wooden floor. "Where's Jim, then, hm?"

"Hey," Jim calls, distant and distracted, which means that he's engrossed in work. "I'm in the, uh. Study."

Which could mean anything, as Jim's is a moveable study consisting of his drafting table and associated paraphernalia positioned in whichever part of the house takes his fancy in any given month, week, day, hour - where the light comes through a particular pane just so, where he can see some part of the garden that acts as a trigger to that mysterious part of Jim's brain that produces the work: "Just wherever feels right, you know?" Jim says, although he knows that George doesn't know, for George can never work anywhere other than at a solid, immovable desk.

Today he finds Jim's study in the open space just beyond the kitchen, where the light comes through the trees and pools in splashes of gold and green on the oak floor. Jim is in blue deck shorts and a white polo-shirt, one bare foot resting on the flank of the dog splayed out fast asleep under the drafting table. With that look of earnest concentration, Jim looks like a child at his homework. What a picture they are - if George could only draw. If a camera were only to hand.

George sets the grocery bags on the countertop and calls over, "Hard at work?"

"Mm?" Jim glances up, blinks once, eyes as distant as his voice for the moment it takes him to grind the gears of his focus from the orderly world of straight lines on drafting paper to the world of living people, of George. George recognises the feeling, kin to the sensation of being dragged back into the world from the pages of a book. "Oh. Yeah. What time is it?"

"Half past four."

"Already? Wow. Guess I got caught up in this." Jim leans back in his chair, stretching his arms up over his head with a feline arch of the spine, as though flexing muscles stiff from a long sleep.

"Well, please don't stop on my account," says George, but he's looking at the strip of bare skin over Jim's hip where his t-shirt has ridden up with the stretch - the flat muscled stomach and etched hipbones that are relics from his Navy days.

A heated look in Jim's eyes when George meets them lets him know he's been caught. The knowing curve of Jim's mouth is a promise.

"Nah," Jim says, tossing his pencil back onto the drafting table. "I think we're both done for today."

-

Jim fresh from the shower is a lovely thing, all smooth tanned skin, slim lines, muscle tapering down under a towel slung low around his hips; the suggestion more tempting than his nudity would be. George, half-dressed in trousers and a clean, unbuttoned shirt, cannot resist. He steps up behind Jim where he stands combing his wet hair to lie flat in the mirror, and fits his hands to the inviting angles of Jim's hipbones.

"Let's beg off," George says, into the soft damp hair at the nape of Jim's neck.

Jim tilts his head back against George's shoulder. "She's _your_ friend, old man."

"Our friend," George corrects.

"She was yours first." Jim smiles at their reflections, tucked into the clear oval cleared from the mirror clouded over with the shower's steam like one of those miniature portraits lovers used to carry in the days before photographs. There are hardly any photographs of George and Jim - a few intensely private snapshots, nothing to be tacked up onto their walls or displayed on shelves side tables in gilded frames. What are photographs anyway, George thinks, but poor imitations of memories.

"Come on, Professor Falconer, set an example for the class," says Jim, tapping George's left wrist in a light reproach. "Responsible people keep their commitments."

" _Fuck_ responsible," George says, with a brief bite to Jim's bare shoulder, which tastes of soap.

"You keep that up and I'm going to need another shower," Jim says, swallowing. "A cold one."

-

At seven-ten, only a little late, George drops a kiss to Charley's smooth, powdery-soft cheek. "No Richard?"

"Oh, _Richard_ ," Charlotte says, with imperial disdain, and thus Richard is dispensed with. George sees that Charlotte has decided to be brilliant tonight, with none of her brittleness. He catches Jim's eye over the teased construction of Charlotte's beautiful hair; Jim's look is amused and indulgent.

Years ago, when George and Jim were newly embarking upon the process of becoming George and Jim, there had been a lingering frostiness between Jim and Charlotte. George had had an uncomfortable time of it, caught between Charlotte's jealousy and stung pride and Jim's prickly refusal to accede to her prior claims. The chill had never really thawed entirely until Charlotte met Richard, with whom George got on as well as a man like George could get on with a man like Richard.

Now, "Charlotte, you look _ravishing_ ," Jim says, sweeping in to give her a genuinely affectionate peck at the corner of her painted mouth. "Really, if only I weren't - "

"Oh, _you_ ," Charlotte scolds, delightedly, with a kittenish pat to his chest. "Is that gin, darling? How sweet of you, really - George, hop to it, won't you? I'm just _gasping_ for a G &T."

"Oh, allow me," Jim insists, and leads the way on into lounge, brushing past George in a way that's not accidental.

Charley hooks her arm through George's as they follow.

"He's a dream, your boy," she says, sighing.

"Isn't he," says George.

-

There is a reason why a bottle of gin is the standard offering of any visitor to Charlotte's home. In London Charlotte's parties had been famous - infamous - and at the heart of them always Charlotte and George, drinks in hand; the brightest young things of a glittering set. With a strong-mixed G&T in his hand and Charlotte dabbing gingerly at her kohl-darkened eyes to keep tears of laughter from smudging the intricate perfection of her make-up, George feels the echo of that reckless young self stir. He tries to remember what he was like back then, when he was Jim's age - wilder, certainly, less steady. Unsure of himself. An insufferable little prick, probably. If he and Jim had been the same age, they would never have worked. He has had to live, to grow, to earn Jim.

"You've got that look on," Charlotte tells him, drawing him out of his own head as she has always been able to do. "You're getting introspective, Geo."

George crooks a smile. "Am I?"

"Yes, and it's not on," says Charlotte, wagging one immaculately manicured finger at him. "Jim, darling, fix the old man another drink."

-

"You're drunk," Jim laughs, hushed, as they weave back down to their house.

"Drunk, indeed," says George, but he may be, a little, just enough to allow Jim to rest a steadying hand to the small of his back as they pick their way through the leafy darkness of the steps leading down from Charlotte's house, and across the street. Jim accuses George sometimes of imagining watchful eyes behind every set of curtains, but it's late and the neighbours are tucked up snugly in their marital beds. Jim's touch is gentle, protective; a kind of enormous affection diffuses through George like a drop of colour into a clear liquid, until his whole self is tinged with the warm-coloured feeling of loving Jim.

Perhaps he is drunk after all. He blinks and adjusts his glasses and shoves a hand back through his hair, which has gone unruly with sweat from the balmy California night, the clinging humidity. It was a night like this, was it not - a night very much like this -

"Smells a little like rain, huh," Jim says, soft, behind him. They are at the house, now, and Jim is retrieving the keys from his pocket with a homely jangling sound.

"Oh, not tonight," George says. "No, not tonight."

Jim breaths out a stuttering breath of laughter, says, "You hear that, God? George Falconer says no rain tonight."

"Damn right," says George. "Here, give me the keys."

"No, I got it," Jim says, fitting key to lock. The door swings open easily, welcoming. "Home sweet home."

-

"You smell delicious," George says, as Jim settles into bed beside him.

"After Charlotte's place I smell like a God damn ashtray," Jim says, yawning hugely as he shifts close, his body warm and solid where it presses against George's. "I should take a shower, but it's so late."

"Mm, no, don't. It smells wonderful."

Jim huffs, amused. "You haven't had a cigarette in eight years, old man. Don't you think it's time to let it go?"

"One never gets over a first love," George says. He turns his head and breathes in the smell of Jim's skin, overlain with the lingering hint of cigarette smoke.

Jim reaches up and smoothes George's mussed hair flat against the curve of his skull, with lulling brushes of his fingertips against George's scalp. "I don't even know what to say to that."

"Be flattered," George says, muffled against Jim's shoulder. Sleep approaches like a mist rolling across a landscape. "Haven't I chosen you, forsaking all others?"

Jim's chest shudders with a brief gust of sleepy laughter. "I'm glad I'm better than a cigarette."

"Hm," George says, and "infinitely, of course," as the mist rolls in.

"Love you too," says Jim.


End file.
